Top all-time · #5182
Barry Jones
Personal blog · brightball.com/articles · on HN as brightballsecurityprogrammingweb
Barry Jones writes Brightball, a personal blog at brightball.com about security, programming and web. Since 2014, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 89 times, most often “Insanity with Elixir, Phoenix and PostgreSQL”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Barry Jones's blog covers programming, including Elixir and Phoenix, and business topics. HN readers link a business post about what happened to a company and an Elixir and Phoenix post.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Barry Jones writes about email security, DMARC, DevOps, and Elixir from Greenville, SC, and organizes the Carolina Code Conference.
Most-linked posts?
- Insanity with Elixir, Phoenix and PostgreSQL4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-07-06
- /articles/reality-driven-development-fixing-project-management-in-software2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-10-21
- How Microsoft Became Phishing's Biggest Enabler2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-02-23
- Why should you learn PostgreSQL? (2014)2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-02-14
- The Time I Accidentally Ended Up Combating Fraud for a Year2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-02-11
- Automatically Reversing Account Takeovers2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-07-11
- No such thing as “real programming” (2015)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-07-20
- Deploying Dmarc Without Breaking Everything2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-07-24
What Hacker News says?
For what it's worth, I wrote in a lot of detail about my experience a few years back. Might save somebody here from learning hard lessons. http://www.brightball.com/articles/what-exactly-happened-to-... http://www.brightball.com/articles/a-study-of-pricing-and-bi...
Comment linking /articles/a-study-of-pricing-and-billing-models-for-the-web
on “Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers”Submitted Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software as a story · 357 points
HN discussionhttp://www.brightball.com/articles/why-should-you-learn-post...
Comment linking /articles/why-should-you-learn-postgresql
on “Why Use Postgres?”Submitted Story points are pointless, measure queues as a story · 345 points
HN discussionI'm a little late on this one but I'd echo what many others here have said, find a way to push through to the sale and then talk with the board to first, distribute your workload and/or define an exit strategy. You're essentially sitting on a lottery ticket and when it hits, you'll have a heck of a lot more free time. Just looking at this from another perspective, I tried running a contract programming business for…
Comment linking /articles/what-exactly-happened-to-brightball-for-hire
on “Ask HN: I don't want to be a founder anymore”Submitted Docker is the Heroku Killer as a story · 139 points
HN discussionI use Cloudflare and have home built RSS feeds on my site. If you've run into any issues on mine, I'll be happy to look into them. https://www.brightball.com/
Comment linking /
on “Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users”Submitted No such thing as “real programming” (2015) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionYep. :) https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-developme...
Comment linking /articles/reality-driven-development-fixing-project-management-in-software
on “Scrum is fragile, not Agile”Submitted Insanity with Elixir, Phoenix and PostgreSQL as a story · 26 points
HN discussionAgreed completely. My detailed write up here fwiw. https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-developme...
Comment linking /articles/reality-driven-development-fixing-project-management-in-software
on “Tasking developers with creating detailed estimates is a waste of time (2020)”Submitted Insanity with elixir and phoenix and postgresql as a story · 6 points
HN discussionBy the same logic though, at the point that heavy write load becomes a reality it's just as feasible to move the heavy write table to an isolated datastore and leave 95% of your data (structurally) in the PG. Even use a PG foreign data wrapper to connect to that new datastore to allow PG to continue any necessary queries against it. I'm not ever going to argue for heavy stored procedure usage but there are definitel…
Comment linking /postgresql/why-should-you-learn-postgresql
on “PostgREST – REST API from any PostgreSQL database”Submitted Insanity with Elixir, Phoenix and PostgreSQL as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is a much longer topic but it boils down to 2 things: 1. Switching your database is not easy with or without stored procedures because it will involve down time for the application while the data is migrated, then verifying that it works as expected in the new database with that ORM. You hope for the best, but it's always more complicated to switch a database. 2. The ORM tends to lock you into the application s…
Comment linking /postgresql/why-should-you-learn-postgresql
on “PostgREST – REST API from any PostgreSQL database”Submitted The Time I Accidentally Ended Up Combating Fraud for a Year as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe bigger issue is this idea that everything needs to live in one place. For the bulk of an application handling a billion requests / day I'd wager that most of that traffic is isolated to certain types of data. I'd wager that because in almost every case I've ever seen it's true. You just don't tend to see every table in a normalized dataset bearing the traffic load. If that is the case, rolling that particular pi…
Comment linking /ruby-postgresql/rails-gems-to-unlock-advanced-postgresql-features
on “PostgREST – REST API from any PostgreSQL database”Submitted Automatically Reversing Account Takeovers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSame experience here. I have a process that I generally go through to compare languages...I rebuild my blog. It's an exercise that I've done many times and it gives me a time-boxed experience that compares work flow, database interaction, web requests, dealing with CSS/JS/assets, potentially caching, routes, email, search, etc. It's not a perfect measure but it does a solid job of giving me the whole experience of w…
Comment linking /articles/insanity-with-elixir-phoenix-postgresql
on “Elixir 1.5 released”Submitted Why should you learn PostgreSQL? (2014) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFirst 10 years of my career were heavy PHP. I’m solidly into Ruby and Elixir now, but I completely agree with you on the perks of PHP. People love to hate on it. https://www.brightball.com/articles/no-such-thing-as-real-pr... (Old article with a lot of dead links now, just FYI).
Comment linking /articles/no-such-thing-as-real-programming
on “I still love PHP and JavaScript”Submitted SSH::Batch – Simple distributed SSH commands as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've been attempting to preach the PostgreSQL Gospel ( http://www.brightball.com/articles/why-should-you-learn-post... ) for a few years now about this exact same thing. When you look at your database as a dumb datastore, you're really selling short all of the capabilities that are in your database. PG is basically a stack in a box. Whenever I started getting into Elixir and Phoenix and realized that the entire Elix…
Comment linking /articles/why-should-you-learn-postgresql
on “Is PostgreSQL good enough?”Submitted How Microsoft Became Phishing's Biggest Enabler as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell, I wrote up a quick draft while it was on my mind. Here you go! https://www.brightball.com/articles/automatically-reversing-...
Comment linking /articles/automatically-reversing-account-takeovers
on “Experian, you have some explaining to do”Submitted The time I accidentally spent a year combatting fraud as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAfter reading this, I felt like I needed to writeup my thoughts on the matter in a more permanent form than the comment section. http://www.brightball.com/development/no-such-thing-as-real-...
Comment linking /development/no-such-thing-as-real-programming
on “The self-hating web developer”Submitted The Time I Accidentally Spent a Year Combatting Fraud as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHad a very similar experience when I shut down my contracting business. https://www.brightball.com/articles/what-exactly-happened-to...
Comment linking /articles/what-exactly-happened-to-brightball-for-hire
on “One In Five Employees Is Highly Engaged and at Risk of Burnout (2018)”Submitted Waste Spammers Time to Reduce Their Return on Investment as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
